When Real Steel was released, Scott Meslow wrote in the Atlantic that “Matheson’s writing lends itself particularly well to contemporary Hollywood because it’s ‘high concept’—which translates, in screenwriting parlance, to ‘easy to pitch.’ At the heart of Matheson’s best tales you’ll find a simple, compelling question, from I Am Legend (‘what if a mass epidemic left a single man alive?’) to ‘Button, Button,’ the short story that became [Richard Kelly’s] The Box (‘would a needy family sacrifice the life of a complete stranger for a massive financial windfall?’).”

“But Matheson was hardly just a Hollywood idea factory,” writes Rob Bricken at io9. “Matheson’s dark, existentialist style influenced science fiction in every medium. His prose was humanist, but it was also bleak and ambiguous in a way that science fiction hadn’t been before, revealing the way the ambiguities of human nature play into stories of the fantastic. Ray Bradbury called him ‘one of the most important writers of the 20th century.’”

some of his credits:

screenplay and source story for Spielberg’s Duel (just saw some of this again yesterday on showtime — still my favorite spielberg movie)

several Twilight Zone, Star Trek, Night Stalker eps

The Incredible Shrinking Man screen play and source story

Somewhere in Time, same

What Dreams May Come, same

Stir of Echoes

ADDENDUM: Figured boing boing would have something on this. here’s a link to cory doctorow’s interview from 2011 (mp3).

a very sweet film that recalls diane kurys’ peppermint soda, because it’s about how middle class french teenage girls come to terms with growing up so gracefully — and the contrast between their beguilingly offhanded insularity and the fragility of that world where self-consciousness and shame never seem to exist, at least that seems to be how it is

This film, like my other ones, are actually about things that could be very melodramatic. For me in a way it could be a tragedy. I mean this girl, she’s crazy about a boy who always goes away and leaves her. She attempts—she tries to commit suicide and she overcomes it, but not really. And then he comes back and then leaves her again. It could be really big melodrama. But I never tried to do a melodrama. I always tried just, as in my previous films, I want my children to look at it in a way that so that the film doesn’t belong to a genre but is simply a film about life. To me the film cannot be about reality, about real life, if it’s part of the genre. It’s a kind of paradox because as a viewer, as a spectator, I don’t have any problem with that and I can be crazy about film, I can really love some films that are melodrama. But it’s not the same thing when you are a spectator and then when you make your own films. You don’t try to get the same things. And as a spectator, I’m very open. But as a film maker I try to be as honest as I can about life and about my experience. And I feel if I tell a story I want it to be as—I want to try to transmit a feeling of truth, and not—even if at the end people—I don’t try to make people cry as much as possible or to make them laugh. It’s not that I don’t care about that but to me it’s not as much. I prefer that they, when they go out of the film, maybe they’re not so sad as they could be if I put the music at this point or if I make more dramatic scene. But I prefer that they have a feeling of truth and of reality. That’s what I try to get.

where the hell is peppermint soda anyway?

Oh, and see also “kim & jessie” by M83.

Kenny says it’s on DVD, but I can’t find it on amazon in region A format. you can stream it on netflix or amazon though.

susan & i had just been talking about herbert lom — having watched some of The Dark Tower on TCM — when we heard of his passing at the remarkable age of 95; we’d thought him long gone but for someone who never achieved his full potential as an actor, he’d haunted movies for 5 decades

maybe it was being both the scion of an “impoverished” aristocratic family from the czech republic and haunted by the concentration camp fate of his jewish girlfriend. she was deported after they emigrated to the uk just before the nazi invasion, due to a bureaucratic glitch.

he made many films, but i will always remember him as the spooky Louis in The Ladykillers, in which he stood out even opposite peter sellers (his nemesis in the pink panther movies, which i could never abide) & alec guinness.